LogFAQs > #982829888

Zareth posted...

Content leveling along with the player

I feel like this can work, but it has to be done very carefully and there need to be a few challenges that have fixed power levels so you have something to anchor your sense of progression. I think BotW and TotK actually did a pretty decent job of it: There's enough static stuff that you will get your ass kicked if you go there too soon and can enjoy steamrolling it if you go there once you've beefed up a bit, but the dynamic scaling offers a lot of freedom for exploring wherever you want instead of having to follow a more rigid zone order imposed by fixed levels.

That's also helped, though, in that your character growth is directly tied to exploration: You get more health/stamina based on how many shrines you've found and completed, the weapons and armour that you've found, and the items you pick up along the way. "Level grinding" isn't really a thing, so you aren't going to find yourself grinding to become more powerful only to not get any benefit from it because the enemies levelled up with you. It more means that whatever direction you take to explore, your first area will be tuned for a character that hasn't cleared any others, while your tenth area will be tuned for a character that's visited nine others, meaning the overall difficulty experience doesn't hinge on following a specific route or doing the "appropriate" amount of fighting.

Something like Oblivion, though, where clear statistical character growth that doesn't amount to anything because enemies match it (never mind the profoundly unintuitive levelling system that means you lag behind enemy scaling unless you metagame in some really silly ways)? That tends to just kill the sense of growth overall, which is lame and often not properly offset by the freedom of exploration that you get. Then something like FF8 that's a relatively linear game and not an open-world one that benefits from offering full freedom of exploration is just a bad fit for the concept.